09 March 2006
This version is a patch graciously offered by Bruce Moyle, “The patch corrects the use of invalid characters in the itunes tags and also the subtitle length issue (which is still there in the latest version).”

1.5 (Released 17 December 2005)
– Updated to support the revised iTunes Podcast Spec (deprecated support for itunes:category at the item level – blah!)
– Duplicate itunes:duration custom field bug solved (fingers-crossed)
– Fixed some issues with ampersands and other characters not escaping correctly
– Extra special thanks to Christian Wach for pulling this revision together. It wouldn’t exist without him. Chris, did I miss anything?

1.0 (Released 31 August 2005)
– All variables from the replacement wp-rss2.php file moved into the WP-iPodCatter section in WordPress admin Options tab.
– Updated wp-rss2.php file
– Support for itunes:block at an individual post level
– Support for Channel level category
– iTunes’ categories are now listed in the plugin
– Support for itunes subcategories
– Support for itunes:explicit at overall podcast level and individual post level
– Enter itunes:keywords manually or use wordpress categories
– Preview cover images within WordPress admin area.
– Turn your comments feed into a podcast using the replacement wp-commentsrss2.php file
– Automatically detects duration better

I had to revert back to the stock WP wp-rss2.php: after installing the iPodCatter wp-rss2.php file, nobody’s reader — even the permissive NetNewsWire nor Firefox’s Feedview extension — could read the feed.

🙁

Maybe I’m not doing it right, I don’t know. … or maybe there’s something about WP 1.5 as opposed to later versions?

Where should troubleshooting start?

Anyway, I thank you for all the effort you have already put into iPodCatter, which is needed!

I have been working on this for about 3 weeks and every time I replace the wp-rss2 file with the iTunes file, it breaks the whole rss feed for the site. I get an error for line 91 column 1. I even had a php coder at work look at the file and he can find nothing wrong, but the rss error continues. Any suggestions on resolving this?

Garrick, I just found the post at WP forums about the getid3 file not being included and as soon as I located that and uploaded it to the site, everything started working great.
Suggestion: put a link to the discussion over at WordPress on you site. It helped me a lot.
Thanks for a great tool.

is there some kind of documentation (except those relatively useless 3 lines above) on how to actually use this plugin?
what do i have to do where to get a podcast up and running?
yes, I have to put the mp3s somewhere, but what do i do then?

I’m having issues with my feed when using this plugin. It isn’t validating for a couple of reasons, a couple of which would be solved if the plugin used my post summary instead of entire post for the [itunes:description].

IÂ´m trying to use it to a videoblog, and works but there is a problem with the database. I have 15 or more itunes:duration items in my wordpress database without a value. Could it be a detect duration problem? Can I disable duration detection?

Very much liking what you’ve done with this plugin so far.
One request:
We need the ability to vary the author/artist of the content on a per post basis – this needs to be independant of the user publishing the post.

So I setup wp-ipodcatter, but it doesn’t seem to work right. First, it tried to install its files to /wp-content/wp-plugins so I moved all those files to wp-content/plugins where it belongs. Then I activated the plugin and it showed up in the options menu. But changing the options for the plugin seems to have no effect whatsoever on the contents of the feed itself. what gives?

I had a couple problems with this, both related. It didn’t like ampersands & or # signs.

#1 the category Arts & Culture was gagging with the message
The XML page cannot be displayed
Cannot view XML input using XSL style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later.
Whitespace is not allowed at this location. Error processing resource ‘http://radio.bonsaitalk.com/feed/’. Line 23, Positi…

Art & Culture
——————-^

similar error on the Arts & Entertainment
—————————^

#2 Same thing was happening on the phrase, which appears in each of my podcasts. It didn’t like the # sign, so I tried before it but it still gagged.

I’m having some trouble with getting keywords and duration to work. When I fill it out and then save, the information I’ve entered seems to get lost. This is in spite of having set the option to manual in the settings.

Other than that, thanks for making this great plug-in and saving a ton of people a lot of very boring work. 🙂

HAs any one tried upgrading to wordpress 2.0 who is using this plugin? It is not listed as a plug in that works and is not listed as one that doesw not work. Is this plugin needed in the same way with the 2.0 version of WP? I would love to know from someone who has tried it before I give it a shot.

It seems to work (mostly). I set up a test blog with WordPress 2.0 and iPodCatter, the feed validated okay. Upon examining the feed, I noticed that dc:creator and itunes:author are empty. I have not found any other error. In fact, the newest version of iPodCatter definitely fixes some problems. The new wp-rss2.php in wp2.0 works a little different, so Iâ€™m assuming that a minor chance to that will be in order.

Everything is good so far – the new update fixed a few things. However, there is still an issue with the description length – the posts with the episodes tend to be sort of long on the mixtape show site, so feedvalidator.org gives me errors saying that it is exceeding the 4000 word limit. Any workarounds or fixes for this? Otherwise good ish…thanks!

Just wondering if there is a way to add iTunes keywords for individual posts? My category is named “Music Podcasts” and it won’t validate because it says I need to use commas to seperate keywords. I would like to be able to put in customized keywords for each post.

Noticed this: If your podcast’s file-format is m4a/mp4, it is not recognized and added to the rss file as an enclosure. I don’t know if that is hard to do or not, but I do know that the new Podcast-friendly version of GarageBand will use the .m4a and/or .mov file formats.

BTW – I apologize if you have tried to reach me for Mac testing. My e-mail has been down. I’ve included another one with this comment.

I’m using WP 2.0 and wp-ipodcatter and it’s working great except I’ve found myself in the unique situation where I’m using a single WP installation to serve a number of podcasts. I’m organizing each show in it’s own category and this works great for creating a unique RSS feed for each show, but I’m having problems because I want the itunes:subtitle and itunes: summary fields to be unique for each WP category. Instead they are being set by wp-ipodcatter off the WP install information and there’s no way I can customize them for each category, thus my unique feeds on iTunes are showing up with the general level description and not a description for each show.

So suggestions.. would it be possible to allow wp-ipodcatter to have unique subtitles and summaries for each category, or allow a way I can manually override these for each post? I hate to have to do a separate WP install for each show but that’s the only way I can think of to fix this? I’ve even tried passing this feed through feedburner but they don’t allow editing of those itunes fields either.

WordPress Mu Support? Hi Garrick, this looks like exactly the kind of tool we need at the university I work at. Only problem is we’re using WordPress MU. There’s a post in your forums saying you’ve got a version ready to upload. Does that fix it?